Emulation of Multi-Hop Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

There are two usual methods to evaluate a software system in multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks: simulation and real test-bed. The test-bed method is ex- pensive and non-repeatable. The simulation method usually requires re-implementing the real software system inside the simulator, which is also infeasible for large scale software systems. In this paper, we present an emulation system capable of evaluating unmodified real software systems in simulated environments, which is repeatable, detailed, and realistic. The experimental results show that our system is able to emulate large scale ad hoc networks. By using our system, we have greatly improve the performance of the Coda file system in ad hoc networks.